Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Lindbergh Charles Augustus
Title : Aviation, geography, and race
Year : 1939

Link download : Lindbergh_Charles_Augustus_-_Aviation_geography_and_race.zip

Aviation has struck a delicately balanced world, a world where stability was already giving way to the pressure of new dynamic forces, a world dominated by a mechanical, materialist, Western European civilization. Aviation is a product of that civilization, borne on the crest of its outlook. Typical also of its strength and its weakness, its vanity and its self-destruction -men flung upward in the face of God, another Icarus to dominate the sky, and in turn, to be dominated by it; for eventually the laws of nature determine the success of human effort and measure the value of human inventions in that divinely complicated, mathematically unpredictable, development of life at which Science has given the name of Evolution. Aviation seems almost a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era, strengthening their leadership, their confidence, their dominance over other peoples. It is a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion, another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe -one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown. But aviation, using it symbolically as well as in its own right, brings two great dangers, one peculiar to our modern civilization, the other older than history. Since aviation is dependent on the intricate organization of life and industry, it carries with it the environmental danger of a people too far separated from the soil and from the sea - the danger of that physical decline which so often goes with a high intellectual development, of that spiritual decline which seems invariably to accompany an industrial life, of that racial decline which follows physical and spiritual mediocrity. ...